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One, But Not Done: Perry Jones Stays in the Game

By Michael Sokolove April 12, 2011 12:00 pmApril 12, 2011 12:00 pm

Perry Jones, the Baylor basketball player and subject of my March 13 cover article, is not by nature a contrary person. He likes to do what’s expected of him. It’s his strength — he’s coachable — but also a weakness. He’s compliant, sometimes passive.

From the moment he arrived on Baylor’s campus in Waco, Tex., last summer, everyone — his coaches, teammates, N.B.A. scouts — expected he would play one season and then turn pro. (As Jones’s A.A.U. coach Lawrence Johns put it to me, when I was reporting the story: “Come on, man, what would you do? He’ll leave. You looked at these draft boards. NBADraft.net. ESPN. Everybody’s got him top five. No one expected this. That’s what you work for.”) And then, right on the eve of the postseason Big 12 tournament in March, the N.C.A.A. ruled that Jones was ineligible to play because, while he was still in high school, his mother accepted short-term loans from Johns to pay the family’s mortgage. Johns also took him to an N.F.L. preseason game in San Diego as a graduation gift, another violation.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…